Krysalis: Krysalis (40 page)
He glanced at Robyn. She shook her head and shrugged, minuscule movements scarcely visible to anyone who wasn’t looking for them.
“Something bothering you, Robyn?” Tom asked.
Robyn fidgeted, smiled wanly. “No.”
“Good,” Tom said. “Now drink some orange juice and relax.”
David couldn’t do that. He knew that Robyn had something to tell him, but not in front of Tom. Something important.
As he looked from Robyn’s concerned face to the genial countenance of her FBI contact, he felt only the tension of the past few hours. The gray-and-white boarding pass in his top pocket, evidence of a freedom that for the moment was being allowed to continue, merely heightened his sense of foreboding.
Last night, Tom Burroughs had shepherded him and Robyn to a Pontiac Sunbird parked near the bar where they’d been drinking. David, supposing this was the end of the line, got into the back without a protest. The first hint that he might still have a chance came when Tom parked the car under one of the approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge and switched license plates, a tactic he was to repeat twice more before dawn.
“What’s happening?” David asked Robyn. A little to his surprise, he found he did not resent the way she’d turned him in. If their roles had been reversed, he might well have done the same.
“I don’t know.” She was sitting in front. Now she
turned sideways toward him and clutched the headrest of the driver’s seat, her fingers gripping it with nervous spasms. “I’ve met this guy, once, briefly. He’s something to do with Lawrence Pattmore, the friend I told you about. But I … he’s coming back.”
She released her hold on the headrest and turned away.
“Shouldn’t really be doing this,” Tom confided as he got back into the driver’s seat. “Though it seems like Robyn okays you … is that right, Robyn …?” She nodded. “And I don’t want anyone to know where you are for the time being. David—I’m going to call you David, if I may?”
“Yes.”
“We have some serious things to discuss.” He shifted into first gear and pulled away from the curb. “Depending on how it goes, I may make a report, I don’t know yet. The thing is, I feel we in the bureau ought to have some instructions concerning you, and yet we don’t. It bugs me. I tingle right down my backbone—you ever have that sensation?”
“Sometimes.”
“Okay. You listen to your tingling?”
“Sometimes.”
Tom laughed, a relaxed, country-club sound that David found reassuring. “For the record, you are officially clean as far as my office is concerned. We have no interest in you. Now you tell me, should I be interested in you?”
David hesitated. He felt drawn to this man, a handsome, middle-aged, just the right side of fat American, with a pleasing manner and homely voice that reminded him of the actor fames Stewart. But the
thought of confiding in a stranger, even a friend of a friend of Robyn’s, gave him pause.
Robyn, sensing his doubts, turned around and said, “You’d better tell him. The harder you make it for the FBI, the harder they’ll have to be on you.”
David, still unsure, had replied lightly, “He can be hard?”
“Don’t be fooled. They’re all hard.” She paused. “Even Lawrence.”
They’d driven around New York while David, haltingly at first, and then with greater fluency, explained the situation. At one point Tom stopped in Chinatown to stock up on spare ribs and Coke, but mostly he just drove without speaking. When David at last had finished, he kept his thoughts to himself for a good few miles.
“One thing occurs to me,” he said at last, “and it’s this. We aren’t stopping off anyplace until we get to the airport tomorrow morning.” He checked his watch. “Correction, this morning.”
“You’re letting me go back to England?”
“I’ve no reason to hold you. But I sure as hell know one thing, my English friend: I
ought
to have a reason. If all you say is true, and I don’t doubt a word of it, the CIA should be breaking every back in Langley to finger you. There’s a procedure for that, well-worn and true. It involves briefing the FBI for what we call cooperative action. Yet you don’t show up in that frame.”
“You’ve made inquiries about me?”
“Sure. Where the FBI and the CIA interface, there are gray areas. Give and take, you know? We hack their computer, they hack ours, nobody sweats. But sometimes the gray area turns into a
big
black hole. So much nothingness you can’t believe.”
“What does that tell you?”
Tom shrugged. “God knows. I plug in my computer and tap a few keys, and what my screen notifies me is that David Lescombe exists and is of relevance to the United States of America, but that at the same time he does not exist and is of no relevance to the United States of America. With me?”
“Enough to feel pretty sick.”
“Yeah. I need gas; you guys watch out for someplace open, will you?”
The found an all-night gas station. While Tom went inside to pay, David leaned forward across the front seat and said, “Do you trust him?”
She did not answer at once. When she did find words, they were not entirely reassuring. “I … think so.”
“What’s that meant to mean? He’s not who he says he is?”
“Oh, yes. But …”
“But what?”
“Remember what he said about … tingling sensations?”
David sat back slowly. “It seems odd that he should help me,” he admitted. “Isn’t he double-crossing his own side?”
“I just … don’t … know. Look, David, when we get to the airport, I’ll make some excuse to leave you and I’ll phone Lawrence. Ssh, he’s coming over.”
David waited until Tom had again settled himself in his seat. Then he said, “Why are you doing this?”
“Helping you, you mean?” Tom eased his Sunbird into the scant, small-hours traffic before he replied. “Robyn’s a part of it,” he said at last. “That’s a big plus. But the real answer to your question is that the CIA has been trashing us for too long. I think you’re a
straight guy and the company’s using you. I’ve seen it before and it makes me want to puke. Call it idealism, if you like.” He gave one of his relaxed laughs. “In fact, I really wouldn’t mind if you accused me of being an idealist, no one ever has before.”
“That’s it? The reason, I mean.”
“I could tell you a lot of things about the politics of interagency infighting, David, but they wouldn’t help you. Just accept that you’re kind of useful to me and a few of my friends, right now. You … well, let’s say you represent an interesting opportunity to do good in the world.”
“I’m grateful. But I can’t make it up to you.”
“Yes, you can.”
“How?”
“By pretending we’ve never met.” When David laughed, Tom’s voice sharpened into hostility. “I’m serious. If this goes wrong, and someone asks you how you spent tonight—lie.” He glanced over his shoulder. “You too, Robyn.”
David heard the tension in his voice and knew he wasn’t faking it.
“Now,” Tom said. “I’ve been doing some thinking. Seems to me your worst problem is with the goons who called on Robyn.”
“The Eastern Bloc?”
“The whatever, yes. I’m guessing they’re from the same outfit that attacked you in Cornwall. They’ve tried to speak to your daughter, no joy—we know that from your conversation with Albert. They’ve tried to neutralize Robyn, even less joy. But what’s clear from all of this is that they want to break off any line of inquiry that might lead you to Anna.”
David swallowed. “Break …?”
“Oh, let’s not get overdramatic. Nobody’s died yet, and if they wanted to kill you, believe me, they could. Something else to remember: there are other, very powerful agencies that don’t want you stopped at all. Your people, MI6 and the rest. If I read the signs right, they’re praying you’ll find your wife, and anyway they think you know where she is. So they’ll help you run wherever, no problem there, not until you either find her or give up the hunt. Then they’ll move in on you.”
“Which leaves?”
“The good old company. The CIA, US of A Unlimited, incorporated in the state of nowhere, without liability or responsibility. And I’ll tell you, after the Eastern Bloc, as you call it, that’s what’s worrying me most.”
“So what am I to do?”
“Keep running. Run fast. If you can beg or steal enough money for
Concorde,
do it. And count cents.”
“What?”
“It’s a saying we use in the department. It means, oh … be suspicious of your own mother, heck,
especially
your own mother. Don’t take anything at face value. Don’t trust anyone, assume everything put in front of you is rotten through and through. Check the small change. Count cents.”
“I will.”
“You know what? The more I think about this, the more I wish we were in England right now. There’s people there who’d talk to me.”
“About what?”
“The CIA’s true motivation in all this. You see, David—” even though they were in the car and isolated from the street, he lowered his voice “—an increasingly important task of my department is to
monitor the law-breaking activities of other U.S. intelligence agencies. Unfortunately, there’s more to monitor all the time.”
He turned sideways to Robyn. “I’m almost tempted to go with him, what d’you think?”
“I can’t ask that.” David meant his voice to sound final, but yearning showed through. The prospect of an FBI agent riding beside him gave infinite reassurance, nothing, no one, could touch him then. “You can’t just leave your job and spend a fortune on airfares.”
“The bureau would pay my fare.”
“David has to face this alone,” Robyn said fiercely. The two men reacted in different ways: Tom with a chuckle and a shake of the head, David by slumping back in his seat. He knew that Tom was eying him in the minor and tried not to let disappointment show.
“It’s tempting,” Tom said. “Very.”
“You’ve done enough already,” David put in reluctantly. “I don’t need any more help.”
“Right!” Robyn seemed almost desperate. “Why won’t you see how impractical you’re being? Tom, please!”
David felt confused. How come Robyn was so adamant that he should go back to England alone, when this man was ready to accompany him? He worked for the FBI, she’d admitted that herself, what greater protection could he hope for?
He unwillingly began to wonder if she had told him everything back there in the bar.
“It would mean my slipping away without a word to anyone,” Tom said after a long pause. “Or there’d be no point. And I have to be careful—the FBI’s strictly speaking an in-country organization, although …”
When he tailed off, Robyn said quickly, “I could
phone Lawrence, tell him where you are, if you want.”
David at once understood the test she was setting Tom. In the nerve-racking seconds of silence that followed, he wondered with mounting uncertainty what Burroughs would say.
“Great idea, Robyn. You do that, once we’ve taken off.” Tom laughed. “Don’t want Larry canceling the trip, now that I’ve decided.”
David’s heart soared. “You’ve made up your mind to—”
“Hell, yes, I’m coming with you.”
Now, sitting in the cafeteria of the British Airways terminal at Kennedy, David felt mortally relieved that he would not be going back to England alone. Seeing Tom in the light for the first time, he discovered a face dark with stubble and lines, blue eyes remarkable for their absence of movement, a heavy-framed torso on which to hang so many cares of state. If anyone could help him, this man could.
“They’re calling BA 002,” Tom said. “That’s us.”
David stood up to shake hands with Robyn. Suddenly she held him close in a hug, enabling her to whisper in his ear unobserved.
“Couldn’t raise Lawrence. Got the answering machine at his apartment. Nobody at the office knows where he is.”
David’s heart gave a jolt. Somehow he managed to hold her at arm’s length, raise a smile. “I won’t forget you. Thank you.”
“Remember …” she pleaded. “Count cents.”
32
On Sunday, Anna awoke at the crack of dawn. Her head felt muzzy, which was strange, because she had drunk no alcohol the night before. Was Kleist putting sedatives in her food now? Still half asleep, she went to the kitchen, where she found Barzel sitting at the table, a new book, a paperback this time, propped up in front of him.
He was reading voraciously, as if consuming words was a substitute for eating. He scarcely seemed aware of Anna’s presence. She ignored him, as usual.
A cup of coffee revived her. As soon as she’d drunk it she set off for the church. Sunrise had begun to enrich the landscape, but the air stayed cool and she thrust her hands into the pockets of her jeans. She’d brought Juliet’s corn dolly with her. Miss Cuppidge seemed to be the only link she had with the world outside, with normality. Although nothing about her relationship with Juliet was normal, she reflected sadly as she picked her way along the path. It made no sense to say
she was losing Juliet, when her daughter had never really been there.
In the old days, Kleist would ask, “Why on earth do you want David’s child so much? After all you’ve gone through with Juliet …?” “That’s why,” Anna used to say. “Because of Juliet.” Now she found herself wishing she’d replied, “Because I’m brave.” That would have been nearer the truth.